The better the question the more adequate solutions your African Smart City events will offer at the end of the day.

For each topic, I suggest you ask yourselves lots of questions. And then try hard to answer them. Or try to have your potential speakers answer them during the event.

Each time you speak to your key partners, encourage them to suggest those crucial questions that everyone wants to hear answers to when they think about a smart African city.

At the latest National Urban Forum in Antananarivo, Madagascar as he was shown how Tokyo’s city planners use 3D modelling to revive dying city centres and how Morocco tracks the progress of their Villes sans Bidonvilles programme with the help of satellite imaging, one Malagasy mayor wondered, “How do you count the number of toilets in France?” “My city does not have a road and can’t be accessed by cars. How should we create infrastructure here?”, inquired another colleague of his.

Here I suggest some more questions:

ENERGY

How chronic are electricity shortages in Kinshasa? Available solutions deployed to tackle this issue?

How under-resourced are state-owned energy utilities in Namibia? Available solutions deployed to tackle this issue?

What is the % of privately-owned energy utilities across Madagascar?

What is to be prioritized: deployment of tech available incountry (including via Ethiopian offices of multinationals) or import of tech, Or R&D?

What are the top 10 most urgent laws/directives that need to be passed?

In this Calvert Journal piece, Sergey Novikov — Cheboksary, Chuvash Republic-born photographer who self-published FC Volga United, a photobook about football fans who live along Europe’s longest and largest river in terms of discharge and watershed, the Volga — sings on ode to Russia’s dying movie houses:

With more and more cinemas in Russia losing out to multiplexes — sometimes abandoned, sometimes used for discos and fairs or taken over by Jehovah’s Witnesses

Here is where Al Jazeera’s Jane Ferguson laments that Afghanistan’s once thriving cinema industry has not returned after 2011 ousting of the Taliban:

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ECWJxmNwDEM]

While in this 2012 article for Asahi Shimbun, one of the five national newspapers in Japan, Kazuhisa Kurokawa announces the coming down of the curtain on a part of the cinema landscape of Tokyo “that first enraptured Japanese audiences just over a century ago.”

On Oct. 21, the lights went down in the last remaining three movie houses in Asakusa, a historic district just off the Sumida River where the nation’s first movie theater opened in 1903. The structures escaped the devastation of the Great Tokyo Air Raid of 1945 by U.S. bombers but were too old to be retrofitted to withstand a major earthquake. The theaters were operated by Chuei Co., a subsidiary of Shochiku Co.

And as we decry the vanishing cinemas with history, we embrace all kinds of technology-packed movie houses. Here Bloomberg’s Jon Erlichman takes us on a tour of a South Korea-stemming 4DX test cinema.. with Smell-o-Vision in Hollywood, California. Full package there: moving chairs, scent, smoke, and wind.

Throughout its 90-year history, the largest cinema in northern Europe, Oslo’s Kino, “has kept up with technological advances, from pioneering Cinemascope in the 1950s to the late-1990s THX-aimed overhaul.”

Chicago’s Uptown Theater is not that up-to-date. Once one of the largest in America, the Uptown “still stands at Broadway and Lawrence, its decaying interior like a mausoleum,” as late film criticism celebrity Roger Ebert put it.

This view of the Uptown Theatre’s auditorium mezzanine or loge seating area comes from Eric Holubow, photographer behind a cofee table book called Abandoned – America’s Vanishing Landscape.

Note the three colors of cove lighting and careful decoration of the plaster underneath the balcony and surrounding ventilation grilles. These atmospheric effects make one forget one’s troubles and that one is sitting under an immense balcony. The Uptown’s cove lighting system is controlled from a master lighting control panel on the stage. The lights were intended to help encapsulate the audience through the subtle use of changing colors. They could be preset and adjusted to fit the mood of what was being seen on the screen, watched in a live stageshow or heard from the organ and orchestra.

An abandoned movie palace hidden in the back of a Brooklyn furniture showroom… Source: AbandonedNYC

“What happens to your body when you pedal?” Reads a recent post on the Facebook page of Veloferma, a bike farm, set up last month on Kreshchatyk, Ukraine’s major street. This is where the Ukrainians were demonstrating during the Euromaidan, a popular movement that had Viktor Yanukovych flee his presidential post and plunge the country into a crisis that many hope will result in Ukraine’s modernization.

What’s a bike farm, exactly? It’s an all-volunteer-run collective dedicated to every aspect of bicycle education, from safe commuting to repair. That was a quote from a similar project in the U.S., a country that seems to be a leader in such community-centred enterprises.

An African art buff in-making checks out the crowd at the launch of The Pulse of Africa/Пульс Африки exhibition in Pavlo Gudimov’s Ya Gallery art center in Dnipropetrovsk, Ukraine.

At this time, in Dnipropetrovsk, some 500 km southeast of Ukraine’s capital, The Pulse of Africa/Пульс Африки exhibition opened to the public at the Ya Gallery art center. Initiated by Ukrainian curator and fluent French-speaker, Pavlo Gudimov, this creative space is a branch of the eponymous gallery in Kyiv.

Pavlo Gudimov: “Nothing could be more distant from us than Africa, and nothing could be as close as it is.”

Andriy Khir‘s new works from unfinished series “Demonology” and eponymous to the entire exhibition work by Oleksandr Korol are reminiscent of spirits. Both Khir and Korol open a secret drawer, full of residents from the other world, monolithic half-humans half-animals that are equal to animal-people that inhabit folk worldview. The former does this through Hutsul narratives, creating a system of wills, ceremonial arches, prohibitions and beliefs. The latter shows us the results from the heart of Africa itself: flaming boars, anthropomorphic animals, torn (by a beast or by artistic representation) individuals who at their last breath urge viewers to “Not for the World” go to Africa.

..the essential fact of art history is a path in a diametrically opposite direction – where Africa comes to us. And if in Europe, there is a certain opportunity to enter these “dialogues” of the cultures of visuality, then Pulse of Africa becomes the first attempt at reflecting on this “invasion” in Ukraine.